ABSTRACT
How can researchers work collaboratively and safely with indigenous people to represent their end-of-life preferences? A diverse group of New Zealand researchers, comprising both Māori and non-Māori, combined their cultural knowledge and academic expertise to undertake a study of Māori traditional end-of-life cultural customs. This chapter shows how this diverse team worked together on the Pae Herenga study to ensure indigenous voices were heard and their stories were recorded, protected, and cared for. The Pūrerehua Collaborative Research Framework describes the importance of working collaboratively with Māori elders, Community Research Collaborators, and research participants in this study about Māori, for Māori, by involving Māori at every stage of the research process. For example, the request for this study and the framing question (“What are the traditional customs that whānau [family] use to guide end-of-life care?”) was identified by the Te Ārai Palliative Care and Research Group’s Kaumātua [elder] advisory group. A Kaupapa Māori research design [philosophical approach] was used to undertake 61 face-to-face interviews and three digital story-telling workshops involving 16 storytellers (whānau, indigenous healers, spiritual healers, and Māori health professionals) across four geographical sites within Aotearoa, New Zealand.
